Christmas Memoir: Naomi

Christmas Memoir: Naomi

Rebecca, her mother Naomi, & her mother Janette

Next to Easter, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the most joyous occasions in my life.

My childhood memories of Christmas are a treasure. Everyone was on his or her best behavior. Santa Claus would NOT visit a dirty house, so my brother and I had to help our mom clean the house in the morning and the afternoon of the twenty-fourth.

We always went to Christmas Eve Candlelight Services and I remember my 3 year-old little brother trying to stay awake long enough to as he said, “Put a fire on my candle.”

I remember the church being dark, and slowly, as each person share his or her light with another, the whole church was illuminated, spreading a sense of wonder among toddlers, teenagers, adults, business people, carpenters, plumbers, physicians and elderly wise people. It was breath taking.

And as that moment was literally extinguished with the blowing out of the candles, a new sense of excitement rose. People who opened presents on Christmas Eve wanted to rush home and tear open their gifts.

Ours was an ethnically mixed family.  Dad, a Scandinavian, wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve. Mom, of British origins, wanted to wait until Christmas Day.

So they cut a deal, on the twenty-fourth, Dad made supper before church: Lutefisk and oyster stew. We got to open gifts from relatives living far away that night.

The next morning, no child was allowed out of the bedroom until Mom had checked to see if Santa Claus had visited and left some gifts. Then she and my father went to the living room as my brother and I raced out of our bedrooms, still in our pajamas, to see what Santa Claus had given us.

I think Mom and Dad had just as much fun watching our eyes and facial expressions as we kids had looking over the gifts. But we never forgot that it was a religious event and the celebration was in honor of Christ’s birth.

While Dad made the lutefisk and oyster stew, Mom made sure we lit the advent candles of joy, peace, love, hope and last, but most important, the Christ child candle.

Split Rock Lighthouse, MN Celebrates 100 years - first posted Aug. 3, 2010

The worse case of vertigo I’ve ever had was just past Split Rock Lighthouse, near Two Harbors, Minnesota.  My mom, younger brother Tony, Anna and me had walked from the lighthouse to the Lake Superior overlook parapet.  No problem.  It was the 130-foot look down a vertical slab of dark grey rock, to the jagged stone edge of the lake below that did me in.  Even now, 25 years later I can still get a knot in my stomach recalling that view. Yet it was enchanting, too.

It’s with slack-jaw amazement to discover Split Rock Lighthouse was constructed by hauling ALL the building materials UP from the lake, all “310 tons of brick, concrete, mortar, steel and wood, using a steam hoisting engine with derrick and a 60-foot boom.”  This month’s Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine shares this little gem and many more in honor of the 100th anniversary of Split Rock Lighthouse, on July 31, 2010.























When 29 ships were lost in a severe November 1905 storm the federal government stepped in, constructing a lighthouse to ensure safer shipping along the North Shore, where the taconite mining industry was just getting underway. The project cost $75,000 and came in over budget due to the remote locale without roads.  By 1916 a dock and elevated tramway replaced the derrick. “Six weeks after opening the keeper’s log reported a ‘party of visitors.’  Tourists kept coming, by boat or by footpath.  The North Shore highway opened in 1924, really increasing tourism.”  By 1936 the keeper reported 36,000 visitors.

By 1940 the lighthouse was converted from kerosene to electricity. The Fresnel lens of the light flashed for two seconds every 18 seconds.  French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel designed the lens specially for lighthouses, employing refracted glass, which uses less glass, so lighter in weight, with a longer beam.














                

1: Cross section of a Fresnel lens
2: Cross section of a conventional
plano-convex lens of equivalent power   -Wiki


Split Rock Lighthouse was retired by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1969.  It’s now operated by the Minnesota Historical Society which has spiffed up the place for the celebration.  The Light, keeper’s brick cottages and the fog horn building have taken quite a beating from one hundred years’ of Lake Superior nor’easters.  All the renovations are historically accurate, of course.

Photographs taken by Carol and my mom, Julia Mitchell, 1981, with photo prof Harley Straus’ loaned Pentax.  Slice of Lake Superior below thanks to You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RQXehH7V0